Krasnodar, 29 August – Yug Times. It is a typical situation in Kuban cities and towns when some commercial outlet opens in the ground floor of a high-rise block of flats. It may be a store, a pharmacy, a bank, or something else. It may seem a usual thing - unless some disaster would occur, and the entire edifice would fall apart like a house of cards. Many Krasnodar architects say it is quite possible, and raise the alarm - but nobody seems to hear them; or, even if they do, they pretend not to understand them.
“Because of the peculiarities of the design of large-panel buildings and construction with apartments modules, any change in the wall elements may result in weakening of its carrying capacity and destruction,” Yevgeni IvanovKuligin, a member of the independent Kuban Urban Planning Council, explains. “Such works have been explicitly banned by the Rules and norms of technical maintenance of housing facilities.” When a shop or any other facility opens in the ground floor of an apartment house, the façade wall is dismantled, and doors, bay windows, etc. appear instead of the initially built windows. Experts say that it is a common and extremely dangerous practice, because then the ground floors that are meant to withstand the load of all upper floors turn into cheese eaten up by mice. A nine-floor apartment house at 177, Sormovskaya street in Krasnodar is an illustrative example of such activity. Visually it may be revealed that only 7 façade constructions out of the 65 panels of the ground floor have remained intact. In other words, 89% panels have been deformed!
Another problem is that Krasnodar is located in a seismic zone. History proves this fact - for instance, in 1799 and in 1830 then mostly a single-storey town was exposed to mighty earthquakes, up to 7 points strong. Today, such earthquakes might become a catastrophe with thousands of victims.
In the Soviet time, all panel apartment houses were designed to withstand a 3 to 4-point earthquake. But now, it seems that even a weaker shock may cause a disaster - the façades exhausted by the businessmen may not stand any serious earthquake. Public activists have collected many complaints of local residents who informed against active commercialisation of the ground floors. But all their complaints have had only formal replies written for form only so far.
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